Build Leads with Twitter

Twitter has grown very quickly over the last several years, and has shaped a lot of the ways that other social media sites operate. Every major celebrity and company is on Twitter, as are many everyday consumers. Play your cards right and you could find your company developing a sizeable following.

Creating Content

Coming up with content is simpler for Twitter than for most other social networks, because the longest your content can ever get is 140 characters. You’ll want to always be conscious of how your profile will look to people discovering your account for the first time. They won’t likely stay on your account for very long before deciding whether or not to follow you, so always ask yourself: based on only your latest 5-10 tweets, would someone follow you?

Here are some different kinds of things you can tweet:

Questions – Asking questions is a great way to engage your followers. For instance, if you ran an airline, you could ask: “Summer is here! Where are you planning to fly for vacation?”

Quotes – Due to their brevity, quotes are very often retweeted. If you can find quotes related to your industry, it would be very beneficial for you to use them.

Links – You can tweet links to content from your own site, or you can sometimes link to other interesting things related to your business.

Photos and Video –Tweets with media gain extra visibility on Twitter. Sometimes photos and videos will be expanded in the results of a Twitter search.

Building an Audience

Before you start building your audience, make about 5-10 tweets. Nobody is going to follow an account that hasn’t tweeted yet. In order to reach new customers, you’ll need to first get the customers you’ve already reached (on other social networks or on a face-to-face basis) to follow you first.

To get your current customers to follow your Twitter account, add your Twitter profile link to your email signature, your LinkedIn profile, your Google+ profile, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, etc. On your website, instead of posting your Twitter profile link, add the official Twitter follow button. This is more efficient because it enables people to follow you in one click without leaving your website.

Engaging Your Audience

You’ll want to interact with your followers as much as possible. Obviously, when someone mentions you in a tweet (you’ll receive a notification if they tag you), you should respond to them. But not everyone who talks about you or your business will tag you in their tweet. Luckily, you can choose specific key words and monitor when people are talking about them. So you’ll want to save searches that include your brand name, your personal name, any of your product names, etc.

We mentioned earlier how asking your followers questions can help engage your followers. More than likely, your followers will ask questions as well, and answering them is a great way to establish a deeper connection with them. Make sure to follow accounts that are interested in the sort of industry your business is in, and if they ask anything that you can answer in 140 characters, do it.

Advertising on Twitter

Like advertising on any other site, ads cost money; but if used correctly, they make money as well. There are three different types of ads that you can choose from:

Promoted Tweets – If you have a tweet with some exceptionally quality content, you can increase the number of people that will see it by promoting that tweet. When you promote a tweet, it will show up with increased prominence at the top of any search results. Plus, it will pop up on the News Feeds of people who don’t even follow you.

Promoted Accounts – To go above and beyond that, you can pay more money to promote your entire account. For targeted users, promoted accounts show up in the left sidebar on Twitter under suggested accounts for them to follow. Before you do this, though, make sure your account is in high enough quality to justify spending the money to promote it.

Promoted Trends – The most expensive option for promotion is to promote specific Twitter trends. If your company has a specific hashtag associated with it (and it should), you can pay a boatload of money to have that hashtag show up on the list of Trending Topics. However, this option is rumored to cost as much as $100K per day, so you’d probably be best sticking to a cheaper advertising option.